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Cloudera is giving a nice solution if you want to play with hadoop ecosystem (and other cloudera’s add-ons), which is a virtualized single-node Hadoop cluster. The VM is available for VMWare, KVM and Virtual Box and can be downloaded from Cloudera download site

Lately I faced the problem that the VM predefined size was not enough (25GB) and I needed to increase the disk space, something that sound trivial, cost me several hours to figure out how to manage (especially when you are not an Linux admin, and when the graphical user interface of the virtualized guest OS is missing some system functionality).

So below are the instruction for that. I’ll show how to increase the disk size from 25GB to 100GB on VMWare image (using VMWare Player), of CDH 4.x

In the VMWare player, when the cloudera image is shutdown, go to the VM settings, Hardware tab, select Hard Disk devices select the utility button and the expand option. In the dialog set the new size (here 100 GB), press ok
Once completed (this operation will take several minutes, depending on the disk size), a new popup will inform you that the virtualized disk size was increase but you need to modify your guest OS to use the new size. In order to do so we will need to perform several admin operation in the guest OS which is in our case CentOS linux distrib.

The next step is to modify the boot option to start the guest OS without any services and no graphical UI, we will in fact start the guest OS as run level 1 (single user mode). So start the VM, and at the boot screen press any key to enter the GRUB boot manager (you will have 3 seconds to do so). When the GRUB nenu shows, go to the entry for cloudera demo vm, press ‘e‘ to edit the entry, go to the kernel entry and press again ‘e‘, then add ‘1‘ at the end of the line, press enter then ‘b‘ to boot to the newly modified option.

Once booted, login as root (password is cloudera), check the disk size using ‘df -h’ you will see that the disk size is still 25GB, using ‘fdisk -l’ shows the physical disk and it’s allocated partition, we can see that the physical disk (/dev/sda) already reflects the increase of the size but not the partition (/dev/sda1) .
We will change this using fdisk and resize2fs commands

So a the prompt type: ‘fdisk /dev/sda‘, we will delete and recreate the partition, pay attention that the newly created partition needs to start at the same size than the one we delete, in order to note its starting point in fdisk prompt press ‘p‘. In the previous screenshot /dev/sda1 started at 1.

in fdisk prompt press’d‘ to delete the partition, since there is only one partition it will be automatically deleted.

press ‘n’ to create a new partition, then ‘p‘ for primary partition, then ‘1‘ for the partition number, put your previous starting number or press ‘enter‘ to pick the default, put the end size or press ‘enter‘ to pick the default max size (here 100GB)

at this stage a new partition /dev/sda1 should have been created.

type ‘w‘ to write the file partition change to disk.

quit fdisk using ‘q‘ command

reboot as before (you can use ‘reboot‘ command for that) and at the start screen proceed like in step #2 to boot as run level 1), login as root again. Now using ‘df -h’ will still show a disk size 25GB, but using ‘fdisk -l‘ will show that the new partition as a size of 100GB as shown below.

In order to resolve this, at the command prompt type ‘resize2fs /dev/sda1‘. Once the resize ends, your increased disk space should be reflected via ‘df -h‘, below 99GB.

That’s it. You can now reboot as usual and enjoy your increased disk space.